“I don’t want you to quit,” replied Mr. Prenter positively.  “I admire fighting grit, and I want to see you keep hammering away at the work until you win and the job is finished.  The board of directors will stand with me on that, if I can sway them.  As for Mr. Bascomb, you mustn’t take him too seriously.  He’s a first rate fellow in a lot of ways, but there’s no fight in him, and he’s a bit close-fisted, too.  As for me, Reade, and as far as I can speak for my fellow directors, go ahead, just the way you’ve started.  If you can find any way to hammer camp vice harder than you’ve been hammering it, then go ahead and do some harder work with your little hammer.”

“I’ll do it,” promised Tom.  “Now, Mr. Prenter, I don’t believe anything more will happen here to-night—–­perhaps not for two or three nights.  So I think the wisest thing for you to do will be to get back to the house and get some sleep.  The same for you, Harry!”

“What are you going to do?” Hazelton wanted to know.

“I?” repeated Reade.  “For to-night I’m going to remain up, and be out here around this threatened wall.”

“Then that ought to be good enough for me, also,” Harry suggested.

“Not much, chum.  I’m going to take the night trick for the present, and put on you the burden of all the day work.  So you’ll need your sleep.”

“I can swing the day work easily enough,” laughed Hazelton.  “It will be all the more easy as the next few days will be taken up simply with repairing the breaks that have been made.”

“Swing the boat in toward land, Mr. Corbett,” Tom directed the foreman.

At the little landing Hazelton and Mr. Prenter joined the waiting president and superintendent.

“Did you really find out anything?” called Mr. Bascomb eagerly.

“It’s as big a mystery as ever.”

“There’s just one thing we’ll have to do,” sighed Mr. Bascomb, “and that will be to stop running the camp on a basis of old Puritan laws.”

“You talk Reade into it, if you can,” chuckled Treasurer Prenter.  “You won’t find him easy to convince, either.”

Tom didn’t wait to discuss the matter.  Instead, he signaled to Foreman Corbett to run the craft out again.

“If you want to, Corbett,” suggested Tom, with a laugh, as the boat moved over the salt waters again, “you might go ashore and go to bed.  You can easily claim that you engaged with us as a foreman, and that being captain of a motor boat amounts to breach of contract.”

“I’m not fussing,” smiled the foreman.  “As long as I can sleep daytimes running this motor boat is easier than working.”

“It probably will be,” nodded Reade, “unless the enemy go in for a new line of tactics.”

“Such as what, sir?” asked Corbett.

“If this boat hampers them too much they may decide to send it to the bottom with a torpedo.”

“Let ’em try, then,” grunted the foreman, giving the steering wheel a turn.